Follow Creators Across Platforms: One Feed for YouTube, Podcasts, and Substack

A working creator now publishes to YouTube, records a podcast, writes a Substack newsletter, and posts extras on Nebula. No single app's subscription tab shows all of it, so power viewers who follow creators across platforms lose track of half a creator's output without noticing. The fix is not another notification bell. It is a creator-first tracking system built on RSS, the same open format behind every podcast app and Substack publication, with a YouTube-side tool doing the video work.

Why one creator now means four platforms

Platform-native subscriptions leak because they were never designed for your attention. They are notification-first: bells, inboxes, and home feeds are tuned to pull you back into the app that owns them, not to deliver a particular person's work to you. If a creator uploads on YouTube, releases audio on a podcast feed, and sends essays by email, you are following three separate systems, each of which decides what to surface and when. YouTube's own subscription feed is a familiar example of the pattern.

A tired viewer on a couch at dusk holds a phone with its back to the camera while an open laptop faces away and an idle tablet leans against a cushion.
Four platforms, one scattered evening: every device answers to a different app.

Four platforms, one scattered evening: every device answers to a different app.

The workflow in this post is different. You will map each creator's outposts, wire every feed into one place, deduplicate cross-posts, add reminders for schedules and live events, and prune dead feeds quarterly. Five steps, one repeatable skill underneath them.

The creator-first blueprint

The shift is from platform-first to creator-first. Platform-first means subscribing inside each app and hoping the surfaces overlap. Creator-first means indexing people: each creator is a row, and each of their outposts is a feed.

The stack needs exactly two tools. Yougroup serves as the YouTube pillar, with curated Lists, a deduplicated feed, and a playback queue. One RSS reader handles podcasts and Substack. Comparing extension, reader, and web app approaches is worth doing once, but the short version is that they complement each other here rather than compete.

An honest scoping note, because it matters: Yougroup is YouTube-only today. It organizes channel subscriptions, Lists, and a deduplicated channel feed. It does not track podcasts or newsletters. The goal is one dashboard for all creators where every new upload, episode, or issue appears exactly once, and that goal needs both tools.

Map every creator's outposts

Before wiring anything, build a master index of where each creator actually publishes. Start with the creators you genuinely watch or read every week, not every account you have ever followed, and list every outpost: YouTube channel, podcast, newsletter, Nebula page, and anything else they cross-promote.

Creators advertise their other platforms constantly. Channel About pages, podcast show notes, and newsletter footers are the fastest places to find outposts, because that is where creators ask you to follow them elsewhere. Record the exact URLs now: the channel page, the Substack publication, the podcast listing. These strings become feed URLs in the next step, and guessing them later wastes time.

Group creators by theme as you go, mirroring Yougroup's curated Lists model: research, recipes, interviews, whatever your actual interests are. And treat the index as a living document. It gets edited during the quarterly prune, not written once and forgotten.

Wire one RSS feed for podcasts, YouTube, and newsletters

Every platform in this stack speaks RSS, so wiring an RSS feed for podcasts, YouTube channels, and newsletters is one repeated skill rather than three separate setups.

Seen from behind, a person at a night desk types on a laptop whose screen faces them and away from the camera, with a closed notebook, a face down phone, and a desk lamp beside it.
Wiring every feed is one repeated skill: paste a URL, repeat.

Wiring every feed is one repeated skill: paste a URL, repeat.

YouTube channel feeds are the least documented. The URL pattern is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID, where the channel ID is the string starting with UC. Playlist feeds follow the parallel format https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLISTID, with the playlist ID taken from after list= in any playlist URL.

For bulk migration, YouTube's subscription manager has an "Export subscriptions" button that downloads an OPML file any RSS reader can import, which moves a whole batch at once. Podcast feeds and Substack feeds use the same primitive, so one reader handles all three feed types as a single category.

Notably, no YouTube Data API key is required for public uploads. A key is optional, purely for enrichment such as duration and view counts, which keeps setup friction near zero. RSS-based upload tracking without an API key is the same mechanism Yougroup uses.

Substack feeds: /feed, custom domains, and the paywall catch

Substack deserves a short detour because it hides its feeds and trips people up. Every Substack publication has an RSS feed: add /feed to the end of its web address, as in bigtechnology.substack.com/feed. Substack never surfaces this in the reading interface.

The traps:

Account for that split when you map outposts.

Track YouTube creators outside YouTube

Pulling channel uploads out of YouTube's app can go two ways, and the privacy trade-off is the deciding factor.

The Yougroup route ingests YouTube channel RSS with no API key and stores everything in Chrome extension storage: "No Yougroup account, hosted backend, server-side sync, or product analytics." The data never leaves your browser. Because it is open-source and loadable as an unpacked extension in Chrome 114+, developers can inspect or extend it themselves.

The Inoreader route is cloud-based auto-sync. Its YouTube feeds include a Shorts filter, distinct icons to identify Shorts and live videos, and visible video durations in the newsfeed.

Deduplicate cross-posts: one dashboard for all creators

Cross-posting is the norm for working creators. One piece of content appears as a video, an episode, and a newsletter post within days, tripling its surface area in a naive feed setup.

Yougroup already solves the YouTube-side pattern with its "deduplicated, cross-list feed that consolidates uploads from every channel in every list into one clean view." The same habit extends cross-platform: group a creator's feeds adjacently, or under one tag, in your RSS reader so cross-posts become visually obvious.

A few triage rules keep the noise down. Pick a canonical format per piece: video for interviews, audio for commutes, text for skimming. Mark the duplicates consumed the moment you finish the canonical version. In Yougroup, marking uploads watched locally keeps the queue honest, and the same discipline applies on the RSS side. The payoff is one dashboard for all creators where nothing appears twice and nothing important stays buried.

Schedules and live events: pull-based queues beat notification spam

Notifications are tuned for platforms, not viewers. Enabling bells for every creator guarantees spam and still misses cross-platform posts, because a Substack issue never rings a YouTube bell.

A commuter in over-ear headphones walks a city sidewalk at dusk, hands in coat pockets, listening calmly with no screen in hand.
Pull, not push: the queue waits until the commute does.

Pull, not push: the queue waits until the commute does.

Yougroup's queue model is the alternative: sort by newest, popular, or interleaved; mark uploads watched locally; open the queue directly on YouTube and watch on your schedule. Queue-first consumption is pull-based. You visit one deduplicated feed when you have time instead of reacting to pushes all day.

Two additions close the gaps. During the mapping step, note each creator's cadence: a weekly show, a biweekly podcast. A feed that goes quiet against its usual rhythm is itself a signal worth checking. And for live events, pair the feeds with calendar reminders for announced streams and premieres, so time-sensitive content does not depend on you scrolling at the right moment.

The quarterly feed prune

A tracking system is only as trustworthy as its stalest feed. Dead feeds erode confidence quietly, until unread counts stop meaning anything and the dashboard decays into a graveyard.

Every quarter, open each feed in the index, check the last publish date, and confirm each creator still earns their spot. The common dead-feed causes are known: Substack publications migrating to custom domains, where the old subdomain stops resolving, and creators simply going dormant.

Yougroup's Lists make the audit concrete. Research, recipes, interviews: quarterly, ask which channels still belong in each themed list. The outcomes are to retire feeds you have outgrown, fix moved feeds with fresh URLs, and note creators who added or abandoned a platform. A short pass, four times a year, keeps the one-dashboard goal intact.

A local-first, open-source stack that stays honest

The full blueprint compresses to five steps: map outposts, wire RSS feeds, deduplicate cross-posts, queue with reminders, prune quarterly. Yougroup handles the YouTube half with Lists, a deduplicated channel feed, and a playback queue; an RSS reader handles podcasts and Substack. No Yougroup account, hosted backend, server-side sync, or product analytics is involved, and everything lives in Chrome extension storage. The tool is built in the open by Thoughtbubble, actively developed alongside the company's AI apps, prototyping services, and consulting work.

Start with one creator this week. Map their outposts, wire the feeds, and let the quarterly prune keep the system honest.